


Exposure

by ThatAj



Series: Exposure: One Step at a Time [16]
Category: Queer as Folk (US)
Genre: Depression, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, POV First Person, POV Justin Taylor (Queer as Folk), Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Therapy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-13
Updated: 2019-01-13
Packaged: 2019-10-09 08:01:28
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,436
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17403116
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThatAj/pseuds/ThatAj
Summary: I’m not exactly sure how I thought asking Brian to come to session would actually go down but it wasn’t what happened. I was pretty goddamned anxious and I couldn’t figure out if this was the anxiety that had me in therapy or if anyone would be anxious asking Brian Kinney to come to therapy. I guessed it didn’t really matter which it was.Justin asks Brian to accompany him to a therapy session.





	Exposure

**Author's Note:**

> This is the eponymous part of this series, but it's not the end :)

To be honest, I really struggled with the diagnosis of OCD. My therapist assured me that was, in fact, part of the disorder itself. She called it “the doubting disease” and that was pretty on the money. As we talked more, after my first session with her - I had come to realize that the first session with any new therapist is really answering a bunch of questions - I gradually came to understand how _much_ I had been relying on Brian for reassurance about everydamnthing. Is the door locked, are you _sure_ it’s locked? Are you okay, are you _sure_ you’re okay? Did you speak to Gus? Are you _sure_ he’s okay?

Half the time I asked Brian about the door being locked and similar things rather than check myself because I couldn’t trust my own eyes, my own memory. My memory’s not been great since prom but to not trust my eyes as an artist...it was just easier to ask Brian to do it rather than have to face the enormity of it all each time I wanted to assure myself everything was okay. And the crazy remarkable thing? It was that Brian willingly did this for me. He didn’t bitch and moan, he didn’t call me weak or a silly faggot. He wasn’t overly solicitous either and didn’t become a consoling pod person, thank fuck for that. But I guess when I stopped to think about it, I was surprised by how patient he was and how little he pushed back on my need to check and double check that he, Gus, everything was okay. But then if I really really stopped to think about it, I guess I wasn’t so surprised after all and I remembered walking down the street holding his hand or him coming back to the loft after going to Woody’s and not going to Babylon. I remembered him holding me and leaving Gus’s birthday early. I remembered leaving the backroom, pants still unbuckled and trick roughly pushed away and Brian’s arms strong around me guiding me out of the club. I remembered crying in the cramped and smelly stall in the diner and Brian massaging my hand. I remembered countless panic attacks and nightmares and Brian was always, always right there. Never once complaining, never once putting me down.

I guess to me, my own judgment, was that the bashing was a force outside of me. There was an incident, an injury I could point to and say, “this thing, this is the reason I can’t be in crowds, this is the reason my hand shakes.” I could feel like it wasn’t my fault. But with something like depression, like OCD, the problem was inside me, very often it felt like the problem _was_ me. Like if I was strong enough, if I had better willpower, if I wasn’t so goddamn weak, I wouldn’t need constant reassurance. I wouldn’t _need_ Brian the way I started to. Maybe that’s why I would have expected him to be different with all this. Plus, he’s always had some weird guilt thing about the bashing, so I guess part of me also assumed that his concern and caretaking after was some penance he felt he owed. Brian Kinney allows himself to be indebted to no man.

So I certainly felt differently about my struggles with depression and OCD than I did about the physical and emotional sequelae following prom. I certainly felt pathetic. But Brian never gave me the impression that he felt that way - and let’s be real, there’s no shortage of historical data that would indicate that Brian never ever self-censors calling anyone pathetic - and he certainly never seemed to lose patience with my increasing neediness for assurance. It was almost as though he welcomed being able to have something concrete to do.

But still I doubted the diagnosis. I mean OCD with thoughts of suicide and of harming others? Who the fuck had ever heard of that? I wasn’t washing my hands a million times a day so how did I have OCD? But apparently intrusive thoughts of causing harm to oneself or others is not super uncommon, as far as types of OCD go. And whenever I doubted that my therapist knew what the fuck she was talking about - I swear, I sometimes kinda thought she was playing me, like she believed that if I didn’t think I was actually suicidal it would make me, I dunno, not suicidal? Like maybe this was some therapy technique. She always laughed at that and told me she wished therapy was that easy and maybe then she wouldn’t have to spend a decade of her life learning how to do it. She also pointed out that my desire to check that the front door was locked went a bit (read: a lot) beyond a typical reaction to getting Brian’s juicer stolen when I was seventeen years old. Yeah, apparently therapy wasn’t easy. Apparently, the treatment for OCD is hard and kinda painful shit. Apparently, the kind of hand-holding, talk about my father therapy I had been doing was not at all helpful for OCD (or anything really, my therapist informed me with a smirk that reminded me of Brian had Brian been a woman in the business of talking about feelings, needless to say, Brian really liked her when he met her but we’re getting to that).

So therapy started out with a lot of education about what the fuck OCD actually is and she assigned me some reading. She pointed out “how the hell can you change your life in only fifty minutes a week? You’re going to have to do shit between sessions if you want to make any progress.” So I read the damn book and understood OCD a bit more. Luckily, school hadn’t started yet and I obviously wasn’t doing much of anything with my days.

I did have to attend a few days of orientation for Cal Arts in the middle of the summer along with all first year and transfer students. We attended lectures on how to avoid getting ourselves raped (surprisingly nothing about how rapists should maybe avoid raping). And other lectures on avoiding drinking ourselves to death or letting our friends drink themselves to death. And I realized how much older I was - even compared with the other transfer students. Maybe it wasn’t just my age but also that I had basically been living on my own since I was seventeen and sure there was a part of me that envied them a bit and how they got to grow up knowing where home was and not being worried that the second they fucked up or disappointed someone or were too fucking much to handle, they would get rehomed like a problem dog. If there was one thing I got from that hand-holding-talk-about-your-father therapy (and that’s a big if) is that the house Brian bought us in LA was the first place that felt like a home since I came out.

The other thing that made me feel really fucking old compared with my classmates was that they had heard of Rage and they recognized my name as the artist and co-creator. Brian got no end of pleasure at me feeling old in comparison to someone, anyone. And he totally teased me when I told him they made Rage fan art (after I explained to him what fan art is and got an opportunity to point out to him how old he is for not knowing that). He rolled his eyes until I smirked and said, “If you’re making fun of fan art then you’ve clearly forgotten the entirety of the Renaissance and its relationship to the Bible.” And then he called me Giotto while he fucked me roughly over the kitchen counter. He gets a bit possessive if anything even reminds him that I once threw in his face that Ethan called me his muse and god I’m not nineteen anymore and I’m not going to fall for that kind of schmaltz. But if it leads to him just turning me inside out like he did that night, I’m going to let him denial-fuck having any feelings even sort of resembling jealousy and not bother to correct him.

It was sometime after orientation when I had a therapy appointment where my therapist and I decided to start by focusing on my intrusive thoughts about the house getting broken into and....all the terrible things that would happen as a result. And really just fill in the blank with something catastrophic. With juice bars as ubiquitous as Starbucks in LA (actually more common since Angelenos like their coffee independent and single origin), we no longer had a juicer but really everything else was up for grabs in the worst case scenario that was my entire mind from someone stealing that one baby photo Brian has of him and his dad to someone killing Brian in his sleep. And whatever it was, it being entirely my fault. I know I know that sounds absolutely ludicrous but something Regina, my therapist, had repeated in pretty much every session - and usually more than once in a session - is that the pain of OCD is knowing these fears, these intrusive thoughts, are not rational and still feeling like they are totally true and likely to happen. So we decided to start with those thoughts and the related lock checking. And since I was having Brian do all the checking behaviors for me, she suggested I bring him to a session and I fucking balked at that.

“Why not?” she asked.

I shrugged as I pulled and pressed silly putty in my hands. She kept the silly putty and other hand toys in her office for the clients she had with compulsive hair-pulling and, I guess, anyone who was anxious. Manipulating it reminded me of the hours in rehab after the bashing, working so hard to get released so I could finally see Brian. See Brian, whom I desperately wanted to show up to my physical therapy then and absolutely did not want to show up to my psychotherapy now. The best I could come up with for Regina was, “Brian hates talking about feelings.”

“Well _he’s_ not my client, we’re not going to be talking about _his_ feelings,” she countered.

“He doesn’t like talking about feelings period. He says it makes him soft.” I sounded like a petulant child. I sounded like petulant nineteen-year-old Justin who had wanted nothing more than to talk about feelings.

Regina cocked her head to the side. “Do _you_ think talking about feelings makes you less manly?”

“Less manly?” I hadn’t said anything about that.

“Well isn’t that what’s implied when Brian says talking about feelings makes him soft?”

I shrugged. I hadn’t ever thought about it in those terms but I said, “It just seems pointless to talk and talk about feelings. If talking helped, then couldn’t I just talk myself out of all this?”  
“That’s true. If you could talk yourself out of this, you would have by now. You’ve definitely proven that talking alone doesn’t help. Do you think struggling with feelings, with your emotions makes you less manly?”

“Well, it’s something inside me, I should be...I don’t know...strong enough? Disciplined enough? to cut this shit out. It’s fucking checking the lock on the door. Shouldn’t I be able to just stop? Why do I need Brian to come in here? Why do _I_ even need to come in here?”

“I don’t know. Why don’t you just stop checking the locks?”

“I tried!”

“I know you tried. Look there’s a shit ton of stigma around mental health concerns. We’re raised to believe it’s a matter of willpower. But Justin? Think of all you’ve been through. You’ve been through a fucking lot from what you’ve told me. If it was a matter of willpower, you would have done it by now.”

I shrugged again. This wasn’t physical therapy but my shoulders got a hell of a workout in these sessions.

“It’s hard for any of us to admit we have a mental health problem but in my work, I’ve found that it can be especially hard for men. Something about emotions is associated with women, with being feminine. Even the way psychology is described - as a soft science - references the feminine. It can be difficult to acknowledge that we have a problem with our feelings and there’s probably another layer of it for you as a queer man given all the anti-femme messages in the cis gay male community.”

I shrugged yet again as I imagined my shoulders bulking up to rival Ben’s.

“Look, maybe this will make you feel better. The rates of OCD? They’re about fifty-fifty, showing up about equally in men and women.” I could almost see Regina hold herself back from ranting about problems around inclusivity of trans and non-binary folks in research. She continued, “Although if those numbers really reassure you all that much, you may want to a look a little more into your own internalized misogyny.”

I finally raised my eyes and looked at her. “I know this isn’t the type of therapy where we talk about and blame my parents for all my problems, but I feel like this shit I can rest squarely at Craig’s feet.”

“I would say you are absolutely correct about that.”

Since I sure as fuck wasn’t going to let Craig determine anything about my life, I decided to invite Brian to therapy. Then she told me that I actually had to do the asking. Somehow I thought she would call him up and arrange it all and I know therapists aren’t supposed to laugh at you and, okay, she didn’t actually laugh. But I live with Brian Kinney and I know all 32 flavors of smirk. She definitely smirked. So we spent the rest of the session role-playing how I would ask Brian to come to a session and I realized any movie that portrayed therapy as anything other than a boring slog through shit was a goddamn lie.

I’m not exactly sure how I thought asking Brian to come to session would actually go down but it wasn’t what happened. I was pretty goddamned anxious and I couldn’t figure out if this was the anxiety that had me in therapy or if anyone would be anxious asking Brian Kinney to come to therapy. I guessed it didn’t really matter which it was. Anxiety is anxiety and it fucking sucks. I tried to redirect my nervous energy into cooking a dinner that would butter him up, but, you know, with no butter. So I made chicken marbella and haricot verts and decanted some wine and just generally earned the eyebrow raise that Brian greeted me with when he saw it all ready to be served when he got home.

“Sunshine? Can I change from my suit or would you like me dressed for this formal dinner?”

I tried to act as nonchalantly as I could. “Go change, it’s no big deal. I just wanted to fill my afternoon.” He cocked his head and stuck his tongue in his cheek. “I’ll bring everything up to the roof and we can eat up there.” He shrugged and headed up to the bedroom to change and I stacked everything on a tray and, thanks to my years at the diner, managed to bring everything up in one trip.

When we were settled on the roof and each had plates full of food, Brian did the one eyebrow raise again and asked me, “So what’s really going on?”

I looked down at my plate and felt a flush grow from my neck to my cheeks and ears and I felt guilty and when I looked up, I caught a wild look in Brian’s eyes. Fuck fuck fuck. “I, uh, I wanted to know if you would come with me to a therapy session,” I whispered. “Reginathoughtitwouldbeagoodidea,” I said all in a rush.

I was surprised to see the relief across Brian’s face and the tension leaving his body was palpable. “Christ, that’s what this,” he gestured to dinner, “was all about? You had me fucking worried there.”

I got irritated that he seemed to think my worry was misplaced. He knows I get anxious about people being angry with me, thank you, PTSD. “It’s not like I knew how you would react.”

“Of course I’ll go. Why would you think I wouldn’t?”

“I...you’re not the biggest fan of talking about feelings, Brian. I thought you would be annoyed...or angry.”

“Angry? Justin, whatever I like or don’t like, if this is something that’s recommended by your doctor and you trust her, then why the hell wouldn’t I do it?” He looked...hurt? I don’t know, like he was upset that I didn’t assume he would immediately jump to do whatever.

“I thought...you would think it was pathetic that I needed you to….like hold my hand through therapy or whatever.” I was having difficulty maintaining eye contact both because I was so incredibly ashamed and because his expression was just so open and sad and I hated that I did that to him.

“I thought we were past that bullshit just about day three of me puking and shitting myself from radiation.” Did the radiation warp his memory of the saga of Brian-with-cancer?

“You were never planning on telling me you even had cancer. You...you kicked me out of the loft when you found out I knew. I had to fight you to let me take care of you.”

I was still looking down at my plate, convinced that once Brian was reminded of the facts, the actual history of what went down, he would come to his senses and return to being the Brian Kinney I had known for the past six years. I felt his hand brush my cheekbone and then he lifted my chin until he was able to catch my eyes. His eyes were shining like melted chocolate and the setting sun cast shadows over his face that caught all the angles and he looked so perfect and beautiful and I just wanted to memorize how he was in that moment before it was spoiled.

“You’re supposed to be better than me,” he stated simply. “You let me help you after the...after you came to live with me,” he added.

“But...that, that was physical. And so was the cancer. This? This is just me being a pathetic little faggot who can’t pull his shit together.” Let’s not pretend either that in between him supporting me through the aftermath of the bashing and now there wasn’t an entire history of Brian deeming any type of talking “pathetic” and I know he had changed, he had changed for me when he realized that I needed that in a way I hadn’t before, and god how much could I ask him to bend before he just broke. And it still came back, ultimately to the bashing which…”And also that was after...prom...so, you know.”

“I know what?”

“I know you felt guilty. I know my mom pawned me off on you because I was just too fucking much.”

“You think I only helped you because I felt guilty? Because Jennifer asked me to? Otherwise I would have, what? Called you pathetic?”

I looked away, out over the street and counted the cars driving past below, bracing for impact.

“Is that - is that really what you think?” I nodded, still looking away and down at the street. He got up and paced back and forth along the length of the rooftop a few times and stopped and looked at me. I glanced up at him and away again. “I’ve really fucked up.” I glanced up at him again. “I...Justin, you are the bravest person I know.” His voice hitched and I just wanted the earth to open up and swallow me whole. “I would fucking tear the world apart for you.”

So Brian came with me to therapy and sat in the waiting room twisting a small bottle of water in his hands while I went into the office to sign paperwork that gave Regina permission to even acknowledge I was her client and to discuss with her parameters for the session. And when Regina had said this session wasn’t going to be about Brian’s feelings she really fucking meant it.

She started the session by explaining that the focus was going to be on how Brian could “support” me in treatment and then she gave the short version of what she told me about what OCD is. Brian asked if my developing OCD had anything to do with the bashing. I guess his ego is one of those things that makes him so goddamn charismatic that I’ve been following him around since I was seventeen but also if his ego was just fractionally more manageable, he'd be a hell of a lot easier to deal with. And it is so tied to his ego that somehow he would have something to do with me getting OCD. And I’m not a therapist but even I could tell there was a lot to unpack there but Regina just sailed past it, not her client, not her problem. And she responded she doesn’t really know whether the bashing had anything to do with it but it didn’t matter because the treatment would be the same and that actually really reflected my experience and my total absence of curiosity even after Brian asked. When something is a struggle the why hardly matters. The why feels like a luxury, something to ponder when maybe I was feeling better but certainly not then when every day was just trying to sort out what thoughts were mine and what thoughts were OCD and what thoughts were PTSD and what thoughts were depression and was I actually just goddamn crazy and beyond repair.

So the reason Regina wanted Brian in the session, which I kind of knew but really got after the conversation started, was that she wanted him to stop reassuring me and checking shit for me. And realizing that made me nearly sick to my stomach because that was my goddamn life raft and this is what she meant when she said therapy was going to be hard and I hadn’t really felt it until that moment. And so even though I knew that was coming and Brian didn’t, I saw everything I was feeling mirrored on his face and he just looked bereft.

“With anxiety, with OCD, reassurance functions as negative reinforcement.” Regina, seeing the confused looks on our faces, continued, “Since it’s clearly been a minute since either of you studied operant conditioning...negative reinforcement is the removal of an aversive stimulus. Like when you scratch a bug bite and the itch goes away. And it’s really powerful; behaviors learned from negative reinforcement, especially those that avoid or minimize anxiety, are well-learned and difficult to unlearn.”

“But that sounds like a good thing,” Brian interjected.

“And it is…to an extent. What happens when you scratch a mosquito bite?”

I was used to these little lessons and spoke up, “The itch goes away like you said.” Regina stayed silent and waited for me to think. “...and then it comes back.”

“Exactly. If reassurance or checking worked well, if it were effective, you would only have to do it once.” Understanding washed over Brian’s face. “Brian, how often, in a single night, does Justin ask you to check the locks to the doors?”

“A few times,” he admitted.

“And how often does he ask you if you’re sure the doors are locked?”

“Uh...more than a few times.” Brian was generous in his phrasing.

“So each time you check the door or reassure Justin, it helps for a little while. His anxiety decreases. But then it comes back and he needs reassurance again. Like a drug addict trying to avoid withdrawal.” Brian looked stricken. “I know that comparison is harsh, but the mechanism is the same. And we can probably agree that the solution to drug addiction is not to keep giving an addict drugs to help them forever avoid withdrawal, similarly, the solution in OCD is to not continually give someone reassurance or check the locks for them.”

Brian looked no less stricken. “I’ve - I’ve been making it worse?”

“You’ve done exactly what any good and supportive partner would do. If someone we care about is upset, we reassure them, we do what we can to help them feel less upset. It goes against our nature to resist doing what we know will comfort someone unless we understand it’s for their own benefit. This is why I very often have partners or roommates or parents of clients with OCD come to a session.” Brian nodded in understanding. “What we’re embarking on is called exposure therapy, meaning Justin will be exposing himself…” I’ll interject here to say I think we both deserved an extraordinary amount of credit for acting the role of adults and not giggling at that and I swear Regina was baiting us with that phrasing. “...purposefully to situations that evoke distress and he will be resisting engaging in behaviors, learned responses, that while in the short-term reduce the distress, in the long-term reinforce this cycle. And, Brian, since you’re involved in some of those behaviors, to help Justin, you’re going to also have to avoid doing what you’ve been doing to reassure and comfort him.”

…

“Do you think you can do that, Brian?”

Brian swallowed hard and blinked and I spoke, my voice sounding so small to my ears, “You’ve done it before.” Brian turned and looked at me, like really taking me in, and rolled his lips into his mouth. “Remember how after the...after I didn’t want to go out into crowds or even walk down the sidewalk and you made me do it even though I was terrified? You were there as much as I needed you, but you didn’t let me avoid it just because I was afraid.”

Brian nodded slowly and Regina looked especially pleased. “This is exactly like that,” she said. “Exactly. The principles are the same. Justin will build up exposures to more and more challenging ones just like he did with crowds and walking down the sidewalk by himself. And Brian you will still be there for him and supportive, but you can’t let him avoid this stuff, avoid his distress, just like you didn’t then.”

Brian and I looked at each other and nodded slightly, indicating mutual consent, or maybe resignation.

“Justin? Was that part of your therapy after the bashing?” Regina wanted to know. “I didn’t realize you had done some exposure therapy.”

“Oh no...it wasn’t. Brian kinda devised that on his own.” I glanced sideways at him. He shrugged and admitted, “I may have looked some things up on the internet..and, uh, asked Alex, this psychiatrist who I knew back in Pitts.” Brian looked embarrassed like he thought I might care. As if I gave a shit about whether some old queer knew my business when it had been all over Liberty Avenue anyway. I definitely gave a shit that Brian had apparently put in all this effort figuring out how to best help me. I guess I never gave it much thought at the time how he had come up with all these things like recreating the dance. And I guess that makes me pretty fucking self-absorbed.

“That’s pretty impressive, Brian. Sounds like you’re a natural at this.” Regina grinned at him. Brian clearly bit back a smile and blushed at feeling proud of himself and I just wanted to throw myself at him he was so goddamn adorable. And, see, I told you they liked each other.

The rest of the session was more of that slow slog where Regina walked us through exactly how an evening would go if I wasn’t torn to pieces about the goddamn door lock. Like when Brian would lock the door and if he would check it at all. And we planned out every single fucking detailed step of a regular evening. And I tried to point out that Brian isn’t exactly risk averse and maybe we should plan in a bit more caution to a regular evening and Team Mutual Admiration Society informed me that in fact locking the door upon coming home at night and checking the front and back door once before going to bed is in fact perfectly reasonable and typical. I didn’t like it and was reminded that not liking it was part of the stupid process. And after the session, we went to a diner near our house - not a gay diner like the Liberty Diner but just a regular diner that was California in flavor because it widely advertised having a big vegetarian menu - because we needed dinner and I wanted to procrastinate going home and I also certainly knew once we were home I wouldn’t want to eat. Brian sat on the same side of the booth and casually slung his arm over my shoulder even while we ate. We acted like everything was normal. He pretended to gag when I ordered mayonnaise with my fries and stole all of them...and the mayo! And it wasn’t until I was using the last of the cold fries to swirl mayo and ketchup together trying to recreate the exact shade of pink that the sky here turns as the sun is setting that Brian almost too gently asked if I wanted to go and I realized I was dreading going home. I took a deep breath and nodded.

We walked in and I watched Brian lock the door. I got to do that, at this point in treatment. Later on, I would just have to trust that he did it and even further later on, I would have to do it myself. He turned around after locking the door and looked me in the eyes and nodded. I was really grateful he didn’t try to say anything because really what could be said at this point? “I’m sorry your brain is broken?” He toed off his shoes and pulled off his socks and walked to the back of the house where the kitchen was and grabbed a beer from the fridge. He looked over the fridge door and raised an eyebrow and I nodded. Might as well drink. I wasn’t allowed to take any benzos when I was doing these exposures, no matter that they were prescribed for panic and I was almost one-hundred percent certain I was going to panic. Asking about percentage certainty was another fun game Regina liked to play during our appointments. “What are you afraid of?” “Someone will murder Brian in his sleep and it will be my fault.” “What percentage likelihood do you think that is to happen?” And she would actually make me go research statistics of people getting murdered in their beds in West Hollywood!

I grabbed my beer from Brian, he had a few others in his hand, and we walked up to the rooftop. He sat back in a lounger and beckoned for me to sit next to him, squished into his side. I knew the whole point was to have as regular an evening as possible but it struck me as so incredibly just ordinary when everything going on inside me felt anything but. My mind started racing. I was supposed to watch Brian lock the door but had I really watched him do it? Had I been watching his hands when he locked the door or was I somehow distracted by something else? I tried to remember it but all I could remember was Brian nodding at me and I could really, really not remember him locking the door. I thought I could remember the click of the lock, but was my memory just playing tricks on me? I felt like I could remember clearly the shifts in Brian’s back and shoulder muscles as he stood at the door. Why the fuck had I been paying attention to that and to what he was doing? I cursed Brian for being gorgeous and cursed myself for always being so enthralled by his form. And I wondered how could I have seen him lock the door if he had been standing right in front of it and I was directly behind him. I started to get angry with Brian. He should have known that I couldn’t see from my vantage point. He should have made me move to the side before he locked the door. I could feel my anger welling up, nearly certain he had done this as some sort of cruel joke. Here I was in California where I knew no one, no one really, with a man who claimed to be my partner, who claimed to be understanding, who was playing the part of supportive perfectly, but the second he had the opportunity was mocking me and playing with me. And…

“Hey, hey,” Brian interrupted my thoughts. I realized my body had gone stiff and I was breathing so hard I was panting and felt dizzy.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” I was nearly in tears. “I just, I can’t remember actually seeing you turn the lock and I was standing directly...it was my fault, but I can’t remember and can we just…”

“Breathe, you’ve got this.” Brian coached me. “C’mon, count.” He whispered into the hair just above my ear the slow rhythm that I was supposed to use to combat panic attacks.

I turned to look at him more fully. “Am I...it’s not…”

“No, no, this is panic. We knew this would happen. You’re doing exactly what you need to. It’s panic. It’s not dangerous. Okay? You got this.” Brian’s voice rumbled low and calm.

“I just feel...it just feels like I didn’t actually watch you lock the door.” I could feel tears begin to prick the outside of my eyes and god could anyone be more pathetic?

Brian took a long swig of his beer and licked his lips and turned and looked at me. “Feelings...aren’t facts.” I nodded and took a deep breath in and let it out slowly and the corners of his mouth turned up and he whispered, “That’s my boy.” He kissed me and tasted of IPA and Brian and for a moment I felt slightly less pathetic and it felt like there was just a little less pressure inside of me. I reminded myself that this was supposed to feel like shit. The treatment was supposed to make me feel this way, just as the radiation had poisoned Brian while it eradicated the cancer. Reminding myself that I was supposed to feel panicked paradoxically helped the panic. I leaned into Brian and he wrapped his arms around me and we sat like that, pausing to drink our beers now and then, for what seemed like hours. The panic would bubble up with more intensity now and then too, like when I became convinced that Brian would want to go out and then, on top of that, that he would want me to go with him, since the idea of his leaving the house - and having to return - was terrifying and the idea of having to leave myself was even more terrifying. When I asked, or rather embarrassingly, begged, Brian not to go out, not to make me go out, my mind making the seemingly logical leap that because I had the belief, it must be true, his look seemed angry and for a split second I thought that was because he really was going to force me. And geez, when the fuck has Brian ever forced me to do anything? What I’m saying here is that the mind governing me was one that felt like mine but was obviously using some dysfunctional operating system. But then maybe it seemed like he was angry that I would have that thought in the first place and just as quickly his expression turned into that blank expression that conceals whatever he’s really feeling. But he firmly stated he had no plans to go out in a tone that allowed no argument.

What seemed like moments later, although I knew it wasn’t because we were back downstairs in the den part way through watching one of Brian’s movies on DVD, I became panicked that I wouldn’t be able to sleep. And, of course, even though I had actually achieved some level of relaxation, letting the sounds of the movie wash over me and not really paying attention to the plot, I was wide awake and the more I worried I was about sleeping, of course the less sleepy I felt. Brian started running his hand up and down my arm and looked at me. “What if I can’t sleep tonight?”

He leered at me with that smarmy look that he knows that I hate that I love. “I can think of a few things to keep you entertained if you’re going to be up all night.”

I twisted out from under his arm and punched his shoulder. “Brian, I’m serious.”

“What makes you think I’m not?” I just shook my head at him. He leaned towards me, his eye contact was intense, and he said, low, “I’m going to fuck you...All. Night. Long.” I groaned. He held his hands up in mock defeat. “Hey, if you’re not interested…” And let’s be real, there’s never been a time I’m not interested in fucking, being fucked by, whatever, Brian but the anxiety felt so all-consuming it was impossible to imagine my body being able to even feel any other sensation. And I think Brian took it as a kind of challenge, a type of mission, to distract me from myself. We all know the man is a god in the bedroom, or wherever, that ego doesn’t come from nowhere. I sure as fuck did not sleep that night. As the early morning sun began streaming through the windows of the living room, where we had somehow ended up, our bodies tangled up with each other laying on huge pillows on the floor, Brian raised his head and looked at me and gave me a goddamn triumphant and crooked smile. “You did it. Well done, Sunshine.”


End file.
